Chevrolet Volt, Now With Recycled Oil Booms

About 100 miles of oil-drenched boom material used to contain the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico is being used to make plastic parts for the Chevrolet Volt.

General Motors said it is recycling enough material used off the coast of Alabama and Louisiana to produce more than 100,000 pounds of plastic resin. GM will use the material to manufacture the deflectors that direct air around the Chevrolet Volt‘s radiator, and company brass say they’ve got enough to supply the first year’s run of 10,000 cars.

“This was purely a matter of helping out,” John Bradburn, head of GM’s waste-reduction efforts, said in a statement. “If sent to a landfill, these materials would have taken hundreds of years to begin to break down, and we didn’t want to see the spill further impact the environment. We knew we could identify a beneficial reuse of this material given our experience.”

The parts in question are made from a mix of recycled material. One-quarter of the material comes from recycled booms. Another 25 percent is made from recycled tires pulled from vehicles at GM’s Milford Proving Ground. The remainder is a mix of post-consumer recycled plastics and other polymers.

Heritage Environmental collected the boom material from the coast. Mobile Fluid Recovery used a huge high-speed drum to extract the oil and waste water. Lucent Polymers prepped the material for plastic die-mold production. GDC Inc. combined all the recycled materials to produce the components.

GM said it will continue using recycled booms until the supply runs out; it expects to use the material for components in other Chevrolet vehicles.